In the late 1990s, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made grants to study people's attitudes toward retirement and to determine what factors influenced their decisions to retire. Although faculty were not talking to college administrators or human-resources departments about health care, the researchers found to their surprise that when they…

The current downturn has the potential to be more severe and longer lasting than the recessions of the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and early 2000s. By now, rivers of ink have been spilled documenting the financial and economic crisis afflicting the United States and much of the globe. While numerous articles have examined the impact on higher-education…